At one time I got interested in the “eye contact”, or lack of it, on video calls. I was going to present at an online conference, and I wanted people watching to have it look like I was looking right at them. Plus, possibly even more importantly, one-on-one calls with people. I ended up buying […]

If you long for a web of yore were things were better, somehow: The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating […]

I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song remains the same throughout. A typical structure is […]

Malcolm Coles: 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence. Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And […]

Feedbin has custom email addresses now so you can use a unique email address for each newsletter and not worry about a spam leak.

In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops, sometimes as whole exhibitions. She’s got books, stickers, hats, postcards, notecards, and heck, even neck gaiters. If her art wasn’t as charming and well done, […]

Most internet travels by wire. Straight through the dang ocean. Josh Dzieza in a feature for The Verge: These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. […]

You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if your writing opens with something boring or banal. You’re going to lose me, at least. I’ve got a list of stuff to read and watch as long as your arm. Maggie really digs into this, in an effort to get better. Your challenge is finding the compelling problem […]

I’ve heard the new cooperative version of Scrabble made fun of a few times. These pansy youths just wanna hold hands, drink warm milk, and avoid any conflict. Whatever. Nobody is threatening the value of competition. Me, I think cooperative games are awesome. There are still challenges. You work together to solve them. Like, I […]

The best bit of kids technology that we have, and this has been true from say age three to now six, is the Amazon Fire HD Kids. The operating system on it is fine. It loads up decently quickly. It’s locked down to only kids stuff. It’s not upselling stuff for the most part, there […]

This popup that 1Password does by default isn’t my jam: My problem with it is that it isn’t actually helpful. If you do use the feature and save the login, instead of that popup you just get another one that looks essentially the same that you can click to log in. That’s no better! If […]

I just heard about GitButler from a Discord friend. I’m kind of ripe for toying with Git clients I use, as I just switched to GitHub Desktop. I don’t regret the switch, but I don’t love GitHub Desktop so much I couldn’t imagine another switch. Little stuff bugs me. GitButler is free (the FAQ makes […]